Diego's Family Affair
by Sale
Summary: A joint project with my pal Silver, in which Diego Armando reluctantly takes Mia Fey to meet his family Phoenix Wright . The crossover part...well, let's just say this fic was begging itself to be written sooner or later.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer: **I own nothing. And half the credit for this fic goes to my pal Silver. We salute you.

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**Diego's Family Affair**

**Chapter 1**

_August 9, 1:46 PM  
Grossberg Law Offices_

Diego Armando guzzled his fifth cup of coffee that day and slumped over his desk. Business was slow, and the mail had just arrived. He warily glanced over at the pile on the edge of the desk, wondering for a fleeting moment if anything in the stack would actually be worthwhile, since it was painfully obvious that this month's issue of Caffeine Lovers' Digest hadn't arrived yet. He muttered something under his breath, sat up and took hold of the heap of letters, filtering through the seemingly endless bills, advertisements, "Have You Seen Me's," and Publisher's Clearing House envelopes, pacing the room as he filled his coffee cup again and took a casual sip.

And that was when he saw it.

One quick glance at the garish turquoise and yellow envelope told him all he needed to know. He didn't even have to examine the ridiculous blue and green jungle seal binding the envelope shut to know what it was. Resisting every urge to expectorate a spray of his precious coffee all over the room simply from the shock, he stared bug-eyed at the envelope, afraid to even dare open that letter in public and knowing full well that he should probably read its contents sitting down.

As the defense attorney ogled the vibrant piece of postage, another attorney sauntered down the halls at Grossberg's with a manila envelope in her hands. It seemed as though every male staff member had noticed her neckline was about an inch lower than usual that day, and that her skirt was about an inch higher. The whole lot frantically scrambled to pry off their wedding rings as Mia Fey passed by their offices, knowing full well that both of them were quite taken at the moment. The ones who weren't yet married simply struggled to keep from drowning in their own drool as she walked through the building like a supermodel on a runway. Nobody bothered to mention that her outfit was in violation of the firm's dress code.

Mia stopped in the doorway of Diego's office and slinked into the room, shooting her boyfriend a flirtatious wink as she placed the folder on his desk next to him. To her utter astonishment and disappointment, he didn't even see her enter the room. The man seemed to be completely absorbed in something—hunched over his desk, slowly sipping his fifth—or was it his sixth—cup of coffee. She frowned and crossed her arms in frustration. Usually all it took was one whiff of her perfume for anyone with a Y chromosome to melt into a blubbering puddle of goo, and she'd liberally doused herself with the stuff that morning.

She cleared her throat and this time Diego really did spit a spray of coffee onto his desk. He glanced up to where Mia was glaring at him and broke into a cold sweat. Mia had a sinking feeling that his perspiration had absolutely nothing to do with her outfit. "Okay, spill it." She ordered as Diego frantically tried to shove the unnecessarily gaudy envelope into his desk. "Who sent you that absurdly bright letter?"

Diego gulped. "I…er…uh…" He stammered as he flushed a shade of red even deeper than his shirt. "It's nothing at all, Kitten. It's just junk mail."

However, before he could stand up to toss it in the shredder, Mia violently slammed a palm onto his desk and pointed at him with her other hand. "HOLD IT!" She shouted. "Aren't you even going to open the letter?"

"But it's junk mail," Diego insisted.

Mia rolled her eyes. "That doesn't look like any piece of junk mail I've ever seen," She muttered. Just then, she gasped. "You're not cheating on me with another woman, are you? Don't tell me you're trying to destroy the evidence or something like that…"

Diego struggled to explain himself, but the situation was just too hard to explain. He needed another cup of coffee. "Errr..." he managed to utter. "No, of c-course not, Kitten. It's not what it looks like!"

In his flustered stupor, he hardly even noticed as Mia extracted the envelope from his hands. "I thought you said at the start of our relationship that we wouldn't hide anything from each other!" She exclaimed with a pout.

"This is different!" Diego urged.

"Oh really?" Mia replied as opened the envelope and scanned the letter inside. She slyly raised an eyebrow. "Who's Alicia, then?"

Diego suddenly turned pale. "Nobody important." He snapped.

"So you _are_ cheating on me…"

"NO!" The older defense attorney roared as he made a futile attempt to snatch the letter from Mia's grasp.

"I'll ask one more time." Mia frowned as she glared at Diego's panicked visage. "Who is Alicia? If you don't tell me right now and if you don't tell me the truth, then we are through!"

Outside the office both of them could hear a loud cheer from the men who'd been staring at Mia earlier. One of them even had the nerve to shout, "I'm available!"

Diego sighed, stomped over, and slammed the door shut. He trudged over to his coffee machine and prepared another pot of coffee. He was going to need cup #7 a lot sooner than he'd anticipated. Mia stood behind him, tapping her foot impatiently. "I'm waiting, Mr. Armando." She flatly stated.

"It's…" He began to explain, but one look from his girlfriend told him that he wouldn't be able to get out of this one unless he really did tell the truth. Somehow or another, she always seemed to know when he was lying to her. It was almost creepy. "Alicia is…my older sister." He sighed. "Now, Kitten, please give me back my letter."

As Diego reached over to retrieve the letter once again, Mia pulled it back. "That's funny," she quipped. "You always told me you were an only child."

"I really don't like to talk about her, okay?" Diego practically shouted at her. His expression softened a bit as his coffee finished brewing across the room. "We kind of…had a falling out period, if you know what I mean." He muttered, raking a hand through his wild black hair. "My family wasn't exactly supportive when I decided I wanted to become a lawyer. I haven't heard from any of them in years."

His explanation seemed to work for Mia, who stared at him, stunned. She couldn't help but feel a twinge of sympathy for him. However, she regained her composure before she could let her emotions take over and retorted, "If you haven't heard from them in years, then why are you getting mail from them now?"

Diego trudged over to his coffeepot and poured his seventh cup of coffee. He shrugged. "I'm just as surprised about that as you are. You never gave me a chance to even read it."

Mia begrudgingly handed her boyfriend the letter. As he read it aloud, she hovered almost unnecessarily close to him to make sure he spared her no details.

"Dear Diego," He began as he sat back down in his office chair and set his coffee on the desk lest he read something particularly unnerving. "I know I haven't made much of an effort to contact you in a long time, but with you being away for so long, it made me realize how important family and teamwork really is."

Mia skeptically raised an eyebrow. "Did something happen to your parents?" She wondered out loud.

"Child Services took me away from them when I was about fourteen," Muttered Diego. "I highly doubt it."

"What?" Mia stammered. "Why?"

"Well…they weren't exactly…er…" Diego racked his brain for the right way to put it, "…mentally stable."

Mia affectionately squeezed Diego's shoulder. "I'm so sorry," she replied as Diego took another swig of coffee. "If you ever want to talk about…"

Diego put a finger to Mia's lips before she could finish her sentence. "It's okay, really." He insisted as he continued to read the letter. "That's why your cousin and I decided to hold a family reunion. It probably won't be much, considering that the social workers wouldn't let us see Mami and Papi without a police escort, but we're inviting all of our old friends and we need your help to make this party the best it can be."

"A party?" Mia gushed. "That sounds great! Maybe you can make up with your family again!"

Diego gave her a curt snicker. "Really?" He scoffed. "Frankly I think I've come to terms with never seeing them again."

"Diego," Mia frowned. Clearly the man was in denial. "You don't have to act all tough around me. The letter does say later on that you could bring an extra guest. I think I'd actually like to go with you. It might ease some of the tension…"

Diego twitched visibly and chugged the rest of his coffee down in one voracious swig. "But Kitten, we had a date planned for that day…"

"Diego," Mia pouted, "What could be more romantic than attending your family reunion? You're not afraid of commitment, are you?"

"What?" Diego almost upchucked the coffee he'd just downed. "Mia, this isn't what you…"

"Listen," Continued Mia as she massaged Diego's shoulders and read the rest of the letter to herself, "I think it'd be good for you and good for _us_ if we went together."

Diego just shook his head. "You just…" He sighed. "Forget it. It's hard to explain. I'll humor you this once…but don't say I didn't warn you."

* * *

_August 26, 7:32 PM  
Gatewater Hotel Lobby_

Mia and Diego walked up to the reception desk, decked out in their finest formal evening wear. Diego had rented a tuxedo for the occasion at Mia's insistence, and Mia had spent the entire afternoon at the salon getting her hair done. She fiddled with the clasp on her clutch purse and smiled reassuringly at Diego as the receptionist pointed the way to the ballroom. She'd noticed that her boyfriend looked unnaturally pale, and he'd chugged about twice as much coffee as usual throughout the entire day.

"Kitten?" He uttered.

"Yes, Diego?"

He took his girlfriend by the hands and stared into her eyes. "Will you promise me that no matter what happens tonight, it won't affect our relationship?"

Mia stared into Diego's worried brown eyes, perplexed by the situation. She'd assumed that meeting his family meant that their relationship could only improve. "Why would you say a thing like that?" She asked.

"Er…you'll see soon enough." He muttered, pausing for a moment as they reached the ballroom and relaxing his grip on Mia. Next to the heavy double doors was a sign about three feet high with that same jungle-themed logo from the envelope on it. Two blue jaguar silhouettes frolicked under a bright green palm tree, and a couple of birds dotted the unnaturally yellow sky just over the horizon. Diego had hoped he would never have to see that logo ever again.

But before he could run back down the hallway as fast as his legs could carry him and never look back, Mia wrapped her arm around his and pulled him close. "I know you're a little nervous," She tried to reassure him. "Just remember, I'll always be there for you."

She pushed the doors open, leading him into the ballroom…and froze dead in her tracks. Diego had always been told that women were fickle. The scene which unfolded before him was proof enough. Mia's eyes shot wide open and she wrinkled her nose in disgust as the stench of nearly four dozen wild animals bombarded the two of them like a monsoon. The ballroom looked as though the city zoo had just thrown up in it. Monkeys swung from the chandeliers. A llama was in the process of devouring the tassel on the curtains. A water buffalo was drinking from the punch bowl…and a small alligator was swimming in it. To top it off, a toucan swooped over the young woman's head, and several seconds later, Diego noticed a damp, white splotch had landed in her freshly coiffed updo.

Mia stared dumbfounded at the menagerie and stammered, "Somebody call Animal Control…"


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer: **I still own nothing, Silver still owns half this fic, and I want a sandwich.

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**Diego's Family Affair**

**Chapter 2**

_August 26, 7:40 PM  
Gatewater Hotel Ballroom_

Diego shook his head in disbelief. He just knew something would go horribly wrong that night…but he never expected Alicia would bring all of the animals into the ballroom as well. He didn't even have a handkerchief to wipe the toucan poop off of Mia's head. "I told you this was a bad idea…" he began. However, before he could even finish his sentence, he found himself facedown on the ground, just narrowly missing a heap of some sort of animal dung. He felt sorry for whatever janitor would have to clean up after this party, but his thoughts were rudely interrupted as a large, orange ball of fur whammed itself into him and a strong pair of jaws clamped down around his right leg.

Diego let out an agonizing wail as the animal began to thoroughly mutilate his appendage. Mia slowly backed away. She didn't even realize she'd stepped in the pile of manure. But before the beast could cause any irreversible damage to Diego's leg, a T-bone steak seemed to fly through the air out of nowhere and splatter against the wall behind them, leaving a pinkish streak on the once-pristine wall as it slid down toward the carpet. The fully-grown jaguar bounded after the steak as if Diego weren't even there, leaving the attorney to attend to his own wounds.

"Awww, Baby Jaguar missed you!" Mia and Diego glanced up to see a woman about Mia's age staring down at them. As Diego pulled himself back to his feet, the right leg of the tuxedo he'd rented mauled beyond recognition, the woman laughed. In contrast with Mia and Diego's formerly stunning formal attire, she was dressed casually, almost to an absurd extent, in a pink T-shirt and orange shorts. Even stranger was the fact that instead of carrying a purse, she wore a lavender backpack with a rather creepy face embroidered into it.

"Mia…I'd like you to meet my cousin Dora." Diego explained as his girlfriend made her way over to shake hands with her boyfriend's relative.

"Errr…" Mia stammered, unable to look Dora in the eye for some reason. "It's nice to meet you…"

"You've arrived just in time!" Dora exclaimed with a silly grin on her face. "We need YOUR help to get…"

"Actually, I think I'd better freshen up in the powder room…" Mia cut in as she turned to leave. After the encounter with the jaguar, she figured it would probably be in her best interest to get out of that ballroom as soon as she found the opportunity...not to mention the fact that she was already questioning Dora's sanity, even though they had barely met.

Dora clamped a hand on Mia's shoulder. "That's great!" She nearly shouted in the lawyer's ear, confirming Mia's assessment of her mental stability. "I'll come along too! Now how do we get to the powder room?"

Mia took a step back and removed the strange woman's hand from her shoulder. "It's right by the reception desk in the lobby…" she stammered, "You really don't have to…"

"Who do we ask when we don't know which way to go?" Dora half-asked, half-shouted in Mia's face, all the while keeping that stupid grin plastered on her countenance. It was painfully apparent that Diego wasn't the only one in the family with an unhealthy caffeine addiction.

Mia just forced a grin in return. "I really should get going," she replied. Dora hadn't backed down one bit.

"That's right!" She exclaimed as though Mia had answered her question. "We need the Map! Now, if you want Map's help, you've got to say 'Map!'"

"What?" Mia recoiled again as Dora leaned in uncomfortably close to her in eager anticipation.

"Say 'Map!' Say 'Map!'" Urged Dora. About seven feet away, Diego had buried his face in his hands out of sheer humiliation.

"Uh…map?" Mia sheepishly stuttered.

Dora leaned in even closer to her cousin's date. Mia was astounded that this was even possible. "LOUDER!"

Mia cleared her throat and repeated "Map?" in a slightly louder voice. Apparently it wasn't good enough, because nothing had happened and Diego's creepy cousin was still staring at her. Dora's nose had to have been mere centimeters away from Mia's. Finally, overcome with complete and total frustration Mia screamed, "MAAAAAAAAAAP!" at the top of her lungs.

Somewhere up in a room on the third floor of the hotel, a man with spiky gray hair screamed in agony.

Back in the ballroom, however, Mia had backed into a wall. A piece of paper with a face on it had jumped out of Dora's backpack and started singing and bouncing all over the ballroom as if it were on crack cocaine. "You know, I really don't have to use the powder room anymore…" Mia cut in, but she was once again interrupted as a python slithered between the two of them, rubbing up against the rookie defense attorney's leg. Mia twitched and turned to Diego. "Let's go home, please…" she stuttered, keeping one eye on the snake the entire time.

"But you can't go yet!" Dora pleaded. "You haven't talked to Tuga or Linda or Boots or Kira or Iza yet! And Diego still hasn't seen Alicia!"

Mia hesitantly stepped over the python and made her way back to where Diego was examining the gashes "Baby" Jaguar had made in his leg. "Diego, go find your sister and make up with her so we can get out of this mess alive. You have got some serious explaining to do." She snapped. She glanced down at her once-pristine shoes and groaned. She had stepped in some more unidentifiable animal dung.

"Kitten, I tried to talk you out of it," Diego defended himself.

"Diego Armando, my dress is ruined, my hair is ruined, and my shoes are ruined." Mia shot back. "I spent the last few minutes of my life being harassed by a clinically insane woman and a talking piece of paper, which in retrospect I probably should have used to wipe this bird poop off my head!" She screamed at the man, nearly on the verge of tears. "I just want to go home!"

Diego resisted every urge to say "I told you so," and limped across the ballroom. He grimaced as he passed the water buffalo, which harmoniously farted in his face as he passed by. Mia followed him, holding her nose and making sure not to step in any more piles of manure.

The two of them made their way to the bar, where an older woman in khakis emblazoned with that omnipresent jungle seal was staring across the room at the two of them. It sent a chill up Mia's spine.

"Hola, Diego!" She exclaimed as Diego staggered over to the bar with one hand clamped around his scarred and bleeding shin.

"Alicia," he nodded.

"I was going through Mami and Papi's old things a couple of weeks ago," She told her younger brother as she dug deep into the oversized pockets on her shorts. "Look what I found!"

She pulled out a tiny, crumpled piece of orange canvas and smoothed it out on the bar. Upon closer examination, Mia noticed that it had a face similar to the one on Dora's map and backpack. "What the heck is THAT?" She asked Diego, cringing.

Before Diego could offer anything remotely resembling an explanation, the bag sprang to life as if on cue. "Rescue Pack, comin' to the rescue!" It sang as Latin music suddenly filled the air. Mia glanced from Diego to the dancing backpack and back again, at a total loss for words.

"I see you found Baby Jaguar," Alicia observed as the dancing, gyrating container finished its performance. Diego nodded solemnly. Words couldn't even begin to express his utter annoyance with the situation at hand.

Alicia smiled and added, "Animal Control was going to put him down when we found out he had rabies, but Dora and I teamed up to rescue him just in time!" She flashed her brother a grin. "I just wish you'd been there to see it!"

The defense attorney's eye twitched. "Wait…did you just say 'rabies?'" He asked. He was almost afraid of Alicia's answer.

Alicia, however, acted as though she didn't hear him and just prattled on. She was completely absorbed in her own little world. She hadn't even noticed Mia at all. "You've changed, Diego. You used to care so much about helping animals in trouble..."

Diego, in turn, ignored her and snatched his old Rescue Pack up from the bar. "Hey, Rescue Pack," he pleaded. "Turn into a rabies vaccine! I beg you!"

The Rescue Pack looked up. "DIEGO!" It shouted with a grin sickening enough to rival Dora's.

"You talk to backpacks." Mia flatly stated. "I swear, it's like I don't even know you anymore."

Diego broke into a cold sweat all over again. "It's not what you think, Mia!" He tried to explain to her. "It all happened when I was a kid! That part of my life is over now!" He refocused his attention to the Rescue Pack, which had begun to sing and dance all over again. He crumpled it up into a little ball with his massive hands and pegged it in Alicia's face. "I can't believe you brought a rabid jaguar into a hotel!" He shouted. "Are you crazy? Does security even know about this?"

"In English we say 'crazy,'" Alicia cheerfully replied, confirming her brother's suspicions. "But in Spanish, we say 'loco!'"

"This is just lovely…" Muttered Diego as he turned to check up on Mia. Much to his chagrin, his girlfriend had disappeared. "Mia…?"

The rescue pack hopped back into his hands and turned into a pair of binoculars, which the defense attorney used to scan the room. He spotted Mia near the center, staring at the ceiling. Her hairdo was totally lopsided at this point, her skirt was streaked with suspicious brown stains, and she was nearly in tears. "Mia, what's going on?" He asked as he limped over to where she was standing, leaving the binoculars on the bar stool behind him.

Mia said nothing and pointed up at the chandelier, where two monkeys in tuxedoes were tossing her sparkly clutch purse back and forth between themselves.

Diego slapped his own forehead in frustration as Alicia seemed to pop out of thin air from behind them and elaborated. "It's the Bobo Brothers!" She exclaimed. Diego resisted every urge to scream obscenities at his older sister. He hadn't even noticed that she'd followed him across the room! "If you want to stop the Bobos, you know what you have to do!"

Diego glanced over at Mia. "Please, Alicia." He begged. "I've screwed this date up enough. She already thinks I'm as loco as you and Dora are…"

Alicia remained firm in her own cheery way and insisted, "Hermanito, do YOU want to get the nice lady's purse back from the Bobo Brothers?"

Up on the chandelier, one of the monkeys had begun to put on Mia's lipstick. The other dumped a pile of tampons out of the purse, and about four of them bounced off of Diego's head. "Alicia, can't _you_ say it just this once?" He pleaded.

"But it's so much better when you say it, Diego!"

"Not anymore!" Diego snapped. "I don't want anything to do with your ridiculous rescuing from now on! I just want to live a normal life with a normal job and a normal caffeine problem!"

"Say it louder!" Alicia exclaimed with a grin as though he'd said something relevant the first time.

Diego didn't know how to react. The room was so silent he could hear the water buffalo farting all the way by the hors d'oeuvres. He sighed for what seemed like the hundredth time that night, raised an index finger as if he were about to make an objection, and shouted at the top of his lungs, "FREEZE, BOBOS!"

The monkeys stopped dead in their tracks, and the one holding Mia's purse immediately dropped it into the punch bowl, where it was summarily ingested by Kira the Crocodile.

Alicia gasped. "Oh no!" She exclaimed, staring off into space with that same stupid, blissfully ignorant grin on her face. "Kira accidentally swallowed a purse! Al rescate!" And with that, Diego's older sister sprinted and bounded over to the punch bowl.

Diego seized the opportunity to snatch Mia by the arm and drag her, limping all the way, to the door. "Well, you saw my crazy family, I saw my crazy family…I think we are done here."

"That purse cost four hundred dollars…" Mia muttered to no one in particular. She was still in shock.

"Crocodiles sometimes swallow rocks when they…" Diego began, but he caught himself mid-sentence before he could slip into his allegedly dormant animal aficionado mode. "Don't worry, Kitten," he reassured her as they made their way back to the lobby as fast as he could run on a mangled leg, "We're lawyers. I'll just sue Alicia for every penny she's worth.

Mia dodged an awkward glance from the receptionist and scowled. "She can't be worth much."

Diego was about to reply, but then he realized Mia had a point.

The two of them left the hotel and began the long trek across the parking lot to where Diego had parked his car. "Listen, Diego," Mia suddenly uttered after a long, awkward silence. "I really don't know if I can keep seeing you after this. I mean, I know they're your family and all, but that thing with the monkeys and the talking backpack seriously creeped me out, not to mention that snake…"

"Kitten, I can explain everything if you'll just…" Diego began, but Mia cut him off.

"I just think there's too much you've been hiding from me," she snapped. "The next thing you'll be telling me is how all of these animals could talk, and that at one point in your messed-up life you had to dive underwater to put the moon back together…"

Diego struggled to find the right words, but he soon found himself just babbling almost incoherently at the woman. "Mia, I was eight! My parents are in a mental institution now! I didn't exactly grow up in a stable environment!"

"My mother warned me about men like you," Mia sighed. "Drive me home. I never want to speak of this night again."

Diego decided at that point that he would need a lot more than just coffee to get him through the next day.


	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer:** I still own nothing.

**Chapter 3**

_August 27, 3:30 PM  
Courthouse Cafeteria_

"They say he poisoned himself," Detective Goodman explained to Mia as the two of them entered the crime scene. The police had already cleaned the place up, so there really wasn't much left to see. "They've found traces of potassium cyanide in his coffee mug. We're not exactly sure how he could have accessed it, but a few of his coworkers had mentioned this morning that Armando didn't quite seem like himself today. He always seemed so together…"

Mia shrugged. She was at a total loss for words. She almost wondered if dumping him like that after the fiasco with his family was such a good idea after all—even though the animals were a bit weird, and his relatives' sanity was questionable, there was no doubt that Diego was sensitive about it.

As the detective, like every other male member of the police force and every other organization in the city, proceeded to check Mia out during her moment of mental turmoil and grief, he couldn't help but notice a strange, white residue that hadn't quite washed out of her hair from the night before. "Did anything strange happen last night between the two of you…?"

"It must have been the talking backpack," Mia reasoned as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. "I bet that was it all along."

Detective Goodman thought it would be best to bring her in for questioning after that…

**The End**

*Mucho apologies for shortness and anticlimacticness. I thoroughly blame finals week.


End file.
